Middlemarch
MusingsHere
are some excerpts from that masterpiece of civilization-- George
Eliot's
Middlemarch

Manners must be very marked indeed before
they
cease to be interpreted by preconceptions either confident or
distrustful.

--from Chapter II

For surely all must admit that a man may be puffed
and
belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love
with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain
virtually
unknown -- known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours’ false
suppositions.

--from Chapter XV

One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of
property
which it is very unpleasant to find depreciated.

Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned
shoulders aid
the impression of refined manners, and the right thing said seems quite
astonishingly right when it is accompanied with exquisite curves of lip
and eyelid.

Many men have have been praised as vividly
imaginative
on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap
narration
-- reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs, or portraits of
Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat’s
wings
and spurts of phosphorescence, or exaggerations of wantonness that seen
to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of
inspiration
Lydgate* regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the
imagination
that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of lens, but
tracked
in that outer darkness through long pathways of necessary sequence by
the
inward light which is the last refinement of energy, capable of
bathing
even the ethereal atoms in its ideally illuminated space. He for
his part had tossed away all cheap inventions where ignorance finds
itself
able and at ease; he was enamoured of that arduous invention which is
the
very eye of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting
it
to more and more exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the
obscurity
of those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of
anguish, mania, and crime, that delicate poise and transition which
determine
the growth of happy or unhappy consciousness.

--from Chapter XVI

* Lydgate-- A young doctor recently arrived in
Middlemarch.
A central protagonist.

Lydgate: Don’t you think men overrate the
necessity
for humouring everybody’s nonsense till they get despised by the very
fools
they humour? The shortest way is to make your value felt so that
people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not.

Farebrother*: With all my heart. But
then
you must be sure of having the value, and you must keep yoyurself
independent.
Very few men can do that. Either you slip out of service
altogether
and become good for nothing or you wear the harness and draw a good
deal
where your yoke-fellows pull you....

Farebrother: I don’t translate my own
convenience
into other people’s duties.

--from Chapter XVII

*Farebrother-- A reflective pastor in the
Middlemarch
area. A supporting character.

A sense of contributing to form the world’s
opinion makes
conversation particularly cheerful.

--from Chapter XXII

The dreamlike association of something alien and
ill-understood
with the deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense
of loneliness which was due to the very ardour of Dorothea’s* nature.

--from Chapter XXXIV

*Dorothea-- The young woman at the center of
Middlemarch’s
drama.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the
sensation
which this unresponsive hardness inflicted on her. This is a
strong
word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities
that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look
around
with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say
the earth bears no harvest of sweetness-- calling their denial
knowledge.

--from Chapter XLII

She was always trying to be what her husband
wished and
never able to repose on his delight in what she was.

--from Chpapter XLVIII

It seemed clear that where there was a baby,
things were
right enough, and that error, in general, was a mere lack of that
central
poising force.

--from Chapter L

But what we call our despair is often only the
painful
eagerness of unfed hope.

but with regard to critical occasions, it often
happens
that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

--from Chapter LI

For the egoism which enters into our theories does
not
affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the
more
robust is our belief.

--from Chapter LIII

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need
with him.
There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and
emotions
for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode* was not one of
them.
He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic
beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself
occasionally in us all, to whatever confession we belong, and whether
we
believe in the future perfection of our race or in the nearest date
fixed
for the end of the world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying
nidus
for a saved remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief
in
the solidarity of mankind.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable
of eating
out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct
fellow-feeling
with individual fellow-men.

For religion can only change when the emotions
which fill
it are changed, and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the
level of the savage.

--from Chapter LXI

*Bulstrode-- The chief Middlemarch
bigshot. Not
a member of the landed gentry, but a self-made man, of sorts.

Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on
the service
his practice did him in counteracting his personal cares. He had
no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative
thinking,
but by the bedside of patients the direct, external calls on his
judgement
and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of
himself.
It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which
enables
silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly; it was a
perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought and on
the
consideration of another’s need and trial.

--from Chpater LXVI

His mind was crowded with images and conjectures,
which
were a language to his hopes and fears, just as we hear tones from the
vibrations which shake our whole system.

It was more bearable to do without tenderness for
himself
than to see that his own tenderness could make no amends for the lack
of
other things to her.

--from Chapter LXIX

It was only the common trick of desire, which
avails itself
of any irrelevant scepticism, finding larger room for itself in all
uncertainty
about effects, in every obscurity that looks like the absence of law.

--from Chapter LXX

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing
was
than simply to know it, for conjecture soon became more confident than
knowledge and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

--from Chapter LXXI

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its
wishes,
ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see
things again in their larger, quieter masses and to believe that we too
can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

--from Chapter LXXVI

Pain must enter into its glorified life of memory
before
it can turn into compasion.

--from Chapter LXXVIII

Certainly those determning acts of her life were
not ideally
beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse
struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which
great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the
aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being
is
so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside
it.
A new Thersa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual
life, any more than a new Anitgone will spend her heroic piety in
daring
all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their
ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant
people
with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many
Dorotheas,
some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the
Dorothea
whose story we know. Her finely touched spirit
had
still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her
full
nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself
in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect
of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the
growing
good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that
things
are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to
the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited
tombs.